Knight Capital is the latest US broker planning to compete with European exchanges following the introduction of new trading rules in the regionâs equity markets.

Volumes are expected to rise following the introduction this month of the markets in financial instruments directive, the European Union’s new trading framework.

Thomas Joyce, chief executive of Knight Capital, said: “Mifid provides for best execution and validates internalisation so the operating environment across Europe is moving in a direction that is a good fit for our business model. Over the next three years Europe is likely to be a faster-growing electronic trading market than the US.”

Joyce said the company is to launch Knight Direct, an electronic platform that provides direct market access to multiple execution venues, in Europe before the end of March next year. One trading destination that clients can access through Knight Direct is Knight Match, an anonymous dark market that does not display prices and has daily volumes of 250 million shares in the US.

Dark liquidity pools have become popular for trading large blocks while minimising information leakage.

The company is also in discussions about introducing Knight Link to the European market. This system was launched in the US a year ago and connects to 15 bulge bracket banks, allowing them to execute orders outside an exchange and save transaction fees.

Knight Link alerts clients indicating the names a company is interested in trading at any time. If a bank has a matching order, it sends it to Knight for execution. Last month, 73 million shares were executed a day via Knight Link.